I love physical media, you like physical media. The physical media is great, and generally better than streaming or digital downloads, if it is a little less practical.
HoweverBeing physical elements and not digital files saved on many computers in a data center, physical supports have the unique disadvantage of degradation. Although CD and DVDs are not as fragile as vinyl recordings or cassettes, if you don’t take care of them (or even sometimes when you do it!), They could go to the end when we speak.
The illusion of permanence
Everything is relative, and compared to vinyl recordings and cassette bands, CDs are a lot more sustainable. I remember the demos of the first days when someone made a 2 mm hole through a CD, and he was still playing. Of course, it was a bit of something, because the CD was still jumping audible, but these records were marketed as long and long -standing length.
In theory, they are absolutely with a long service life. A CD in the factory (not a written disc) should last longer than the average human life, assuming that it is maintained in ideal conditions. However, we do not live in ideal conditions, so you cannot assume that your CDS will be right for the next 100 years without any contribution from you!
How optical discs really store data
To understand where the weaknesses of these optical discs are, we must take a second and explain how they work. Each disc consists of layers: a transparent polycarbonate substrate, a thin reflective layer (generally aluminum or gold) and a protective lacquer coating. The data is stored as a series of microscopic “pits” and “land” that a laser reads by measuring how light is reflected in these surfaces. The pits and the lands represent the binary code.
The recordable discs exchange the metal layer for a special color that changes the condition with the application of heat from a laser. These discs can last for many years, but are less stable orders of magnitude than the records in the factory.
The Silent Killers: Disc Rot and Degradation
The largest cause of disc errors is scratches. If the outer layer is striped, this can prevent the laser from reading the data in the metal layer. Special disc polishing tools can sometimes eliminate these scratches, but there is only a lot of surface that you can delete before the CD or the DVD is destroyed. If a scratch is deep enough to hit the metal layer where the data really lives, this data is destroyed.
However, even if you keep your discs completely without scratches, there are other diseases that can affect them. Disc to rot is the one you are most likely to hear about. This happens when the metal layer of the disc obeys slowly, which makes the surface illegible by the laser. It is not supposed to occur, because the disc is sealed in plastic and lacquer. However, damage to the disc, such as chipped edges, can expose the metal layer to the outer atmosphere. In some cases, it could be thanks to a defect in the manufacturing process, but the problem would not become apparent until years later.
Plastic layers can also beathered or darken as the adhesives decompose. Heat, humidity and UV exposure accelerate the process. Writing discs have a different problem, where the coloring simply degrades with age. It can fade, move the color or react chemically with the liaison agents now the disc.
How long does they really last?
Predding the duration of physical media is difficult for many reasons. On the one hand, not enough time has not spent whether a disc that claims that a lifespan of 100 or even 1000 years will be up to par. Ideally, all the people involved in the creation of this assertion will put pressure on the Marguerites when the expiration date passes.
What we can observe is that the lifespan varies from one disc to another, and there are therefore discs which are perfectly well after 40 years, and some died in less than 10. Anecdotically, a lot of CDs from my parents from the 90s and the end of the 80s are always good, and the attrition of the disc has been largely lowered to accidents or poor manipulation. I burned hundreds, if not thousands of CDs and DVDs in writing in my life, and assuming that they survived in the first months, they were all thrown because I no longer needed it, not because they failed.
The high heat and humidity are the main killers of all physical media, so if you manage your discs correctly and store them in a cool and dry place, it is likely that they will survive your needs, otherwise you survive.
Save your data before it is too late
That said, in reality, I think you should check your discs for signs of oxidation or discoloration at least once a year. The good news is that, unlike vinyl discs and cassettes, it is simple and practical to make backups of your optical supports without loss of quality. The storage of the hard disk is cheap these days, and invest, for example, a large external disk, will allow you to make backups of your discs in the event of a problem with them. If you use backups to consume your content, this also reduces the wear of your physical media, so it’s a winner in my book.
Although I consider CDs, DVDs and the least vulnerable Blu-ray in physical media, that does not make them invulnerableAnd it is not a huge task to check them from time to time to make sure that your collection remains playable.
- Storage capacity
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2 to
- Compatible devices
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USB
- Brand
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Lacie
